The Windows® operating system includes the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) infrastructure that enables devices and systems in a network to be managed and controlled. More specifically, WMI allows a calling application to access operating system information, services and processes running on a given machine as well as on a remote machine on the network. WMI also allows the calling application to start and stop services, terminate processes and create new processes.
Providers are written for use by WMI to surface instrumented data and events for a particular managed entity on a system. The providers are loadable by the WMI subsystem upon request of calling applications. A loaded instantiation of a provider enables a particular service (e.g., managed object) to surface instrument data and events. Each managed entity instrumented via a WMI provider is compiled to a specific platform architecture (e.g., 32-bit host machine). For example, a 32-bit version of a provider is utilized to surface instrumented data and event of a 32-bit version of a service.
With the introduction of 64-bit platform architectures and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system, a network may now contain both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. The 64-bit version of the Windows system will offer a 32-bit Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (e.g., WOW64) compatibility modes so as to enable 32-bit compiled programs to be run without requiring any modification.